Statistical Disclosure or Intersection Attacks on Anonymity Systems

Abstract

In this paper we look at the information an attacker can extract using a statistical disclosure attack. We provide analytical results about the anonymity of users when they repeatedly send messages through a threshold mix following the model of Kesdogan, Agrawal and Penz [7] and through a pool mix. We then present a statistical disclosure attack that can be used to attack models of anonymous communication networks based on pool mixes. Careful approximations make the attack computationally efficient. Such models are potentially better suited to derive results that could apply to the security of real anonymous communication networks.